Pierce

Slaying Stupidity with Quiet Critical Thinking....
Veteran serving Veterans | Questioning Everyone and Everything |
"Fly Army, Play Rugby"

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

@united Waiting over 1.5 hours from landing for a bag has reached the point of absurdity, especially when there isn’t a single United Representative to be found!!!! Other two made it

[Carolina Hurricanes @Canes]

This city. Wow.

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

https://t.co/dBrhzZqL34

[UFC @ufc]

🫡

[Carolina Hurricanes @Canes]

Cap with his Cup

[NHL @NHL]

THIS IS WHAT 20 YEARS OF WAITING LOOKS LIKE!!! 🎉 #StanleyCup

[Military History Now @MilHistNow]

RIGHT NOW in 1944, the first of 20,000 Allied paratroopers are dropping into Normandy. The long-awaited liberation of France is underway.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

-A nice pension.

-A bunch of dysfunctional and arthritic joints that the VA assures me are not service connected.

-Self-confidence that I can handle pretty much anything.

-Never thinking myself accursed I was not there, and never holding my manhood cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

So today I had a retired US Navy three-star admiral accuse me of being a bot and having never served in the US military.

I posted a rebuttal, which basically caused this Democrat admiral to get swarmed by a social media army of veterans (and patriotic non-veterans too).

I truly appreciate the outpouring of support, but I am also quite interested in what this says about the mindset of America’s veteran community in 2026, writ large.

Most of us? We served in the GWOT and are still angry about it. We are angry that we were sent to do impossible missions of building liberal institutions in 8th Century tribal societies. We’re angry about ridiculously restrictive ROE that got our friends killed. We are angry that for much of the wars we were inadequately resourced, driving soft-skinned HMMWVs down IED Alley. We are angry that we spent all those years to have, in the end, accomplished very little. We are angry at how the VA treated us when we got out. Most of all, we are angry about watching our friends get killed or maimed (or kill themselves when they got home), seemingly all for naught.

And guess what? We are REALLY angry at the senior generals and admirals who led us down this path and never had the cajones to tell the civilian elected leadership what the real deal was. (We’re not angry at Pete Hegseth’s team—we’re angry at the generals and admirals who caused the problems he and his team are trying to fix.)

That admiral who came at me today? He was one of those GWOT senior leaders.

What you saw today was much less an outpouring of support for me and much more an outpouring of righteous anger at a righteous target.

Just wanted to share my thoughts on this, it’s an interesting phenomenon.

[🎼🌺Music Love♥️ @ThoNg676733]

Music video from Swedish rapper Yung Lean and GENER8ION has an amazing choreography, created by French artist Damien Jalet.

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

https://t.co/1oELpkyCVU

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

For the love of God and everything good and great in this world can @FoxNews and @OutnumberedFNC please come to a consensus on how to pronounce Megan Rapinoe’s last name and stick with it!!!

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

https://t.co/R5ZrxsDu70

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Proud to be an American. 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Adam Housley @adamhousley]

This is the pic. The medals. The team. The
Gaudreau kids and his #13 jersey. What a moment.

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

https://t.co/Ss0ClsVW0f

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

https://t.co/6k3Z6NRbEI

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

https://t.co/PWs5uBf45z

[Pierce @SometimesAstute]

https://t.co/kSKJHA6rBV